The concept of buying goods on “credit”, or a promise for future payment, is not new. Today, nearly everyone in the industrial world is familiar with receiving bills for goods and services. Every month, like clockwork, millions of consumers receive bills for goods and services. For convenience, the term “consumer” is used throughout this document to represent both a typical person who consumes goods and services as well as a business that consumes goods and services.
At the end of each billing cycle, a biller typically generates a bill or statement for each consumer account having a positive or negative account balance, or having transactions that yielded a zero balance. As used herein, a “biller” is any party that originates billing statements for goods or services rendered to the consumer. Examples of billers are utilities, government, merchants, and intermediate billing services such as banks. The printed billing statement is typically customized according to the biller's preferences. For example, it is common for billing statements to be printed on colored paper, display the biller's logo, provide a billing summary, and show itemized transactions. This information is organized in a custom format that is unique to and controlled by the biller.
The biller also creates remittance information that associates the consumer account with the bill and any payment toward the bill. The remittance information is typically in the form of a detachable stub or coupon that the consumer detaches from the billing statement and returns along with the payment. This remittance stub is also customized according to the biller's preferences.
Recently, electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) systems have been developed to automate this process of bill delivery and payment. Companies such as Microsoft, Checkfree and Visa, Inc. are developing products in this space, the result of which heretofore has been an associated number of closed, proprietary EBPP systems. One such system is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,465,206, entitled “Electronic Bill Pay System,” which issued Nov. 7, 1995 and is assigned to Visa International.
The Visa bill payment system permits bills to be sent by billers to consumers via U.S. mail or electronically via email. Unfortunately, the Visa system suffers from a number of drawbacks. First, the email message containing the bill must conform to requirements imposed by Visa. This requirement stems from the need to route remittance information back to the biller through the VisaNet® network (one of the four Automated Clearing Houses (ACH) used by financial institutions to clear transactions between financial institutions). Thus, the biller has little or no control over the format concerning how the bill is presented to the customer, but must instead accommodate a format compatible with this network.
Second, the Visa system is designed to support the presentment of “bills” from corporate billers, and would not accommodate the myriad of financial transactions conducted among and between consumers. Third, these prior art EBPP systems (e.g., Visa, Checkfree, etc.) have not be been designed for interoperability. Currently, there is no solution available to integrate all of the users from these disparate EBPP systems into a common, ubiquitous network.
These limitations are significant in a number of respects, the most notable of which are the cost and responsiveness of such prior art electronic financial systems. Moreover, the biller must provide the Visa system with a significant amount of information, which the consumer would likely deem to be confidential. Many billers do not typically wish to share this information with third parties (e.g., the Visa system) for fear that the confidential information may be breached, resulting in fraud.
Recently, communication protocols have been introduced, i.e., the Open Financial Exchange (OFX) and, more recently the Internet Financial Exchange (IFX), as a means through which the disparate, proprietary financial networks can communicate with one another. While these protocols enable billers and financial networks to communicate among one another, it does not provide a framework which enables billers to develop content within the financial networks. While it is known that some EBPP systems enable a biller to customize the billing statement presented to the consumer, it does not provide the biller with unilateral control over the content and format of the bill. Rather, these prior art systems provide the billers with a “template”, which the biller can populate to generate their “customized” bill. The problem, however, is that while the content is unique to the individual biller, the form is not. Quite simply, none of the prior art EBPP systems enable a biller to develop or host their own content, accessible on or through the EBPP system.
Thus, a system and method for secure third-party content development and hosting within a financial services network is required, unencumbered by the limitations commonly associated with prior art development and presentment architectures. Just such a solution is provided below.